PT Just rewatched the prequels over the last few days ...

Pretty terrible looking?

ROTS??

It's easily one of the best looking movies EVER.

As in like in ALL movie history not just Star Wars.

It's the culmination of everything that Lucas worked for in movies in his 30+ years of making them.

Just keeping it to Star Wars related live-action there is nothing that's been done since or likely for a long, long time to come that will even match it. I doubt anything will come anything anywhere near close.

I just don't think that even the concept of the scale, scope or visual imagination will even be approached never mind the actual design and detail.

 

I never got the argument for wanting to remake the prequels. While I am by no means opposed to improving the CGI and effects in all of the films (though that's now out of the question), remaking just one trilogy instead of the whole saga would come across as obvious bias against that particular trilogy. I especially wouldn't want them remade by someone who thinks they can "do it better" and ends up drastically changing the characters or making all of the CGI practical.

Not that I want any of them to be remade.

 

This is not Tatooine. It's some other planet. But don't worry, we literally go back to Tatooine in another episode!

I actually like The Mandalorian well enough, but stuff like this is honestly just bad. To have so much potential with new technology and to just....squander it. I can't imagine looking at the environments in this show and thinking it makes ROTS look anything other than good in comparison. It shows that technology really isn't the most important thing when it comes to selling the reality of an environment. I believe in Coruscant, Utapau, and Mustafar because thought was put into making them seem like real places with a unique, functioning society/ecosystem.

The Mandalorian makes me sad because I see what could be done, but instead the environments are either derivative, generic, or too Earth-like. At this point I feel like it must be a mandate or something.

 

I LOVE The Mandalorian!!!! I think its fantastic honestly. But I love the ST too...

That said: I guess there is a mandate - to shoot everything on location/outdoors when its required. The PT has the reputation for shooting everything inside studio and in front of Bluescreen even the outdoor scenes. Just remember the "real desert" memes from the marketing of TFA. So for getting those biased "fans" in they did that and apparently still do it. That way naturally they have way less possibities to design a planet and enviroment.

Lucas did a smart thing in melting on location shots with Bluescreen shots and mattpaintings. Worked perfect and that way we got great planets!

 

The irony of the Mandalorian doing all those on-location shoots in a studio, and the PT flying out to Tunisia.

@The_Phantom_Calamari What do you mean that's not Tatooine?! I thought he visited Tatooine several times during the season. That's where he met the guy on the 2 legged Mount creature thing.

 

The planet where Kuiil lived and Mando retrieved The Child is Arvala-7. He only traveled once to Tatooine where he met Toro Calican, the rookie bounty hunter.

 

A little strange that there are native Tatooinian Jawas there, with an identical Sandcrawler and everything...

Perhaps the Jawas are space faring, and have a Sandcrawler factory that ships to all Jawa colonies.

 

The Mandalorian mostly achieves what it sets out to do visually, and this is all about creating a sparse, dirty, Western effect. This can feel a little dull and repetitive given the endless possibilities of the GFFA, but it's more justified doing this than the ST.

The PT wanted to be beautiful and decadent, and it achieved this with massive success. People can point to weak moments of CG execution, but the vision is massive and the execution of imagery still holds up today. Lucas successfully expanded the aesthetics of the worlds in SW, and TCW series benefits so much from this. Hopefully future creators in SW take more advantage of the scale and scope of Lucas's vision.

 

Agreed. Don't get me wrong-I LOVED Mandalorian, but there's no denying the vast majority of the environments/terrains were not very challenging from a technology-needs standpoint. It was mostly deserts and forests, for the most part. IMO any film in the PT (or any SW film for that matter) were vastly more grandiose and exotic-and they were displayed well-from Naboo to Bespin to Crait! But that difference in aesthetic was appropriate for the intent of the story those films/series were setting out to tell.

Although I wouldn't necessarily say that there's nothing that's been done that looks as good since ROTS. Even certain Marvel films had sequences where the sets/environments looked even better-simply because of the technology available now. But I WILL agree ROTS still holds the top position in terms of originality and visual imagination!

Now that 4K is out I don't do this anymore, but in the early days of Blu-ray, I used to refer to ROTS as an example of how great a film can look in the Blu-ray format!

Not to mention that if they were to remake the PT, presumably casting other actors (I would hate that personally), it would mess up a lot of other things as well-cos actors from the PT are also in other films as well: we have young Anakin in ROTJ, Hayden, Jackson, McGregor AND Neeson's voices in TROS, and of course there's McDiarmid! Those characters are just too integrated into the other films in order to suddenly have different actors play those characters in a new version of Episodes I-III. I can think of many ways I'd have rather had the films play out-for ALL the SW films. But that doesn't mean the PT films need to be redone, just to have things like more darkness, more clever dialogue, Ahsoka in the films, and more Darth Vader badassery (Rogue One style). No SW film is perfect, but there are many things to enjoy in each.

This. The aesthetics are different on purpose. And really, the directors accomplished what they set out to do.

 

Well, I'm not sure how true this is, given that the show does feature other kinds of environments other than ones directly echoing the American West--it's just that those other environments are also either generic, derivative of other Star Wars locations, or too Earth-like. I'm also not sure what the point of setting a series in a planet-hopping Star Wars milieu is if your primary goal is to focus on one specific kind of Earth-like wilderness setting. But I don't want to get too far into the weeds criticizing the show. I just felt I needed to defend Revenge of the Sith's honor.

On that note, I feel that this scene showing Obi-Wan's arrival on Utapau is one of the purest expressions of what Star Wars aspires to be on the planetary romance front:



It's perfect in every way, from the visuals to the music to the pulpy dialogue between Obi-Wan and the Chairman. It's a Flash Gordon comic strip come to life.

 

I don't mean to suggest Mandalorian _only_ does one aesthetic, but that that's the main aesthetic it attempts to create. I agree with you that it would be nice if future seasons try to branch out from the dirty, sparse desert, saloon feel.

If it achieves that look, we should give it credit for doing so. What we should criticize is the decision to limit itself to mostly one look.

And also open to criticism would be attempting to create other environments and failing. For example, I found the Krill farming setting to be poorly executed and boring. That episode had one standout visual of the demonic walker, but everything else was repetitive and unimaginative.

 

I agree. Episode 4 of The Mandalorian was the least well-executed episode of the season.

 

This is why I appreciated the Canto Bight scenes in The Last Jedi. It's the only scenes in the live action Disney material that attempts to show something grand and opulent in the SW galaxy as shown in the prequels compared to emulating the same old broken down lived in look from the OT.

 

I agree The Last Jedi does look good once or twice, but the casino world was a bit too familiar to Earth, and Crait was too similar to Hoth -- the entire plant could have been red, for instance; that would have been intense: a blood planet. But TROS may actually look better. I thought Exegol was pretty cool and the festival at Pasaana had life and color.

But the PT as a whole had so much more vision and scope it really is amazing. Lucas doesn't receive nearly enough credit for it. Scene after scene in the lambasted AOTC has insane beauty.

 

I think, in theory, it could be done. Personally, I wouldn't want to lose McDiarmid, Neeson and McGregor more as performances and such, along with Dooku and even Christensen, Portman and Jackson, with also Park. But I have thought the PT could have benefited from having more time to expand on it's ideas, characters, relationships and stories. Not necessarily the CGI though. Like, Dooku was Yoda's padawan, but something I never considered was how the idea of that may hurt Yoda, even his death, but TCW has an episode where Yoda has a visual, i think, of his idealized situation, and Dooku I think is still apart of the order. Dooku talks about Qui-Gon fondly, I think, but I think we could've used that to present Dooku with more motivation like him resenting the jedi order for his death and his ultimate goal being to betray Sidious, kill him as revenge for Qui-Gon and take over the senate, placing the jedi as a militaristic force in leading the republic, as the way it should be. These things may not necessarily need expanding on, to me, really, but the ideas of it are palatable to me. As far as casting:

I think Michael Sheen could present a Ian Mcdiarmid-esque-ness to a remake.

 

I wouldn't even entertain the idea of casting a remake of the PT. There's so many stories to tell in the GFFA, that something as asinine as a remake of just those three movies is so silly to me. The entire saga would need a remake at that point, and if that happens, the concept of trilogy would be totally dropped looking at how much work TCW does in developing everything.

Something like that is 40+ years in the future when Disney needs to really milk some money. For now, they're fine with the Child and other new characters.

 

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I would say 15-20 years. It's generational, and the door has now been opened to Star Wars rebooting in one way. They won't do it while George is alive though.

Actually, it's hard for me to picture the movie industry being anything like it is today, even in only 20 years. When will the theaters even reopen? And will they get any business? I know of churches that don't think they'll get permission to seat 250 people or less until July/August, and some changes will be permanent.

Also, Star Trek taught me that television died out in the 2040s.

 

Absolutely agree. Any mention of Star Wars remakes will cause me to go all Rambo on whomever utters such a horrible idea. As you said, there are plenty of rich stories and great characters to build new movies from or even TV shows. Leave my beloved prequels and original trilogy alone. Besides, without even getting into it...Disney would end up changing too many things just to placate that whiners. No thanks!

 

I'm not sure I'd even care. I'd love to see them try, just so I could laugh at the trainwreck that would result.

The only reason I'd say no is because I wouldn't want new generations to think that's what the prequels or Star Wars in general actually were. Same objection I have to those awful live-action remakes of classic Disney animated films.

 

Correct, that’s the problem with remakes and reboots. No, they technically don’t wreck our enjoyment of the originals but we hate seeing unknowing first time viewers thinking that’s the real story or the real Star Wars. There are certain things you just don’t remake or even think about remaking. Star Wars is one of those things.

 

The prequels aren't perfect, but Lucas deserves a lot of credit for the interesting ideas he utilized in the trilogy. These include Qui-Gon discovering the Chosen One, Sidious' blockade trap, Sidious' playing both sides of the Clone Wars, Jango Fett being hired as the clone template, Sidious' manipulation of Anakin, Anakin falling to the dark side in a vain attempt to save Padme, and Anakin's duel with Obi-Wan.

I can watch the prequels and enjoy them. I can't say the same for the sequels, and I ignore them. I do prefer TCW over the prequels, but to me, the film saga goes from Episodes 1 to 6. I feel that the film series should be strictly the story of Anakin Vader.

Additionally, Dave Filoni should be running Lucasfilm. He understands Star Wars to the core.

 

This, precisely.

In ROTJ Anakin “brings balance to the Force” by destroying the Sith.

In TFA, we see a bunch of really powerful dark side users walking around and enslaving the galaxy. They look a lot like the Sith that Anakin destroyed in the last episode.

More respectful of that story and a more logical extension of it would have been to explore how the next generation while training to be the guardians of peace and justice must resist the dark side in order to not become the next incarnation of the Sith. It would have focused on their struggles and the choices they have to make to inherit the victory that Anakin/Luke won for them.

 

I see that ''wow'' reaction on that video's caption, and I don't think that should be surprising for Star Wars ''fans''. It's a good interpretation, and I believe that ''fate'' theme is something almost every Star Wars ''fans'' should've known. And I would say Filoni's description is not perfect. I think it's true that Qui-Gon/Anakin's fate was in danger, but I also think that duel changed Maul's and Kenobi's fates a lot. Maul could've been so much more as Sidious's apprentice, and Kenobi should've died in normal circumstances, which is why I believe that Filoni's description is incomplete, he explains it only from Qui-Gon's and Anakin's perspective (which is understandable since Anakin has the Chosen one potential) but Maul's and Kenobi's fates were also important.

 

Being an original fan of the OT from back in the day, I've always supported the PT from it's initial release and have enjoyed the films overall to this very day. I can easily re-watch them as often as I have the OT.

Seeing Anakin's fall, the fall of the Jedi, Palpatine's masterful manipulations and execution of his plans to corrupt the Republic into the Empire, I thought it all worthwhile for Lucas to explore the familiar yet mysterious backstory of the OT after so many years.

And yet, my main nitpick with the PT remains the romantic dialogue between Anakin and Padme. It is so stilted and for me, it dampens the overall emotional impact of their relationship as a viewer. Yes, on the surface, seeing him fall to the dark side, how that affected their relationship, Padme's eventual death amidst the birth of life, that was painful to watch but had their earlier romantic dialogue been...more mature or at least more naturally flowing, then for me, it would've strengthened their emotional bond over the films and made the impact of both of their falls more dramatic and tragic beyond the mere surface value of seeing it.